The country round Maturín is dotted here and there with villages, as well as with isolated cottages. The larger cattle-owners often live in the towns but have here and there small houses for their employees. A typical _casita_ is simplicity itself. Upright posts, tree-trunks with their branches trimmed off, are planted firmly in the ground, six feet or more apart, and cross-pieces are tied to them, at a height of about eight feet. The rafters of the roof, lighter poles, are also tied on, and palm-leaves form a most efficient thatch, throwing off the heaviest rain, and lasting for years. At one end of this roofed enclosure a small space is rendered more private, to serve as the retiring-room of the inhabitants. A few light trunks or branches are tied horizontally across the uprights, about a foot apart, and either palm-leaves are tied to these, the bedroom walls, in fact, being thatched like the roof, or a more solid mud wall is constructed on the wooden framework. The soil itself is the floor. The traveller seeking a night’s shelter slings his hammock to some of the uprights in the outer room, having no walls around him, but a roof over his head. A small fire is kept going in a corner of the outer room for cooking purposes. In the simpler cases very little furniture is required: a log or two to sit on; a few bowls of different sizes made of gourds cut in half, serving as cups or plates; an iron pot on the fire; an upright log, stuck in the ground with a bowl-shaped hollow at the top serves as a sort of mortar, in which maize, &c., may be ground; and another somewhat similar device, with a wooden lever for crushing sugar-cane, the juice running out below into the gourd placed to receive it. It is easy to set up a home of this sort; the site once selected, the materials for house and furniture are always at hand, and the whole thing can be done in a few days. The traveller, of course, always carries his own hammock, rolled up tight in a sausage-shaped bag carried across the saddle, either before or behind the rider. On arrival at one of these homesteads he can almost invariably count on a civil reception, and without further preliminaries slings his hammock, which then serves him as chair as well as bed. Sometimes he may chance on a spot where food is scarce at the moment, but generally the good people will find something for him. A sancoche made of a fowl stewed in its own juices, cassava in thin cakes, sprinkled with a few drops of water to soften it, some beans, and some roast plantains (cooking bananas) form a menu which, even if it does not appeal to an epicure, proves both tasty and satisfying after a long day in the saddle. Houses of this type are generally inhabited by one family only, who are looking after the flocks and herds of some wealthy owner or are in a very small way of business themselves.